


Do-Over, With Elvis Presiding

by rhysiana



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: All the Bad Argents are Dead, All the Good Argents are Alive, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Has Been Carved Up For Bits That Make Sense Re: Peter Hale's Motivation and Character, Canon Related, Getting Back Together, Las Vegas Wedding, M/M, What is Canon's Timeline Anyway?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-25
Updated: 2018-05-25
Packaged: 2019-05-13 11:59:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14748447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhysiana/pseuds/rhysiana
Summary: “Dad. What in the hell is this?” Allison asked, color high on her cheeks.He looked back down at the desk and carefully, oh so carefully, did not react in any way at all. “It’s a marriage license.”“Yes, Dad, I noticed that, too.”He raised his eyebrows and tried, pointlessly, to deflect. “Why were you looking through Vegas marriage records anyway?”





	Do-Over, With Elvis Presiding

**Author's Note:**

> So this is canon-ish? Canon-esque? Think sort of early S3 characterizations, after Victoria died but before they tried to convince us pre-fire Peter was super skeevy for no reason. The events of S1-2 still happened as backstory, the events of S3 are irrelevant. Also, since TW supposedly exists in a "world without homophobia," we're assuming same-sex marriage has always been legal in Nevada (and everywhere else). If werewolves exist, why not that? Just go with it.
> 
> Many thanks to hmslusitania for the beta, and to anodyneer for encouraging this nonsense.

Chris was in the middle of doing invoices when Allison slapped a piece of paper down on the desk in front of him.

“Dad. What in the hell is this?” she asked, color high on her cheeks.

He looked back down at the paper, still obscured by her hand, and settled for a mild, “I won’t know until you let me see it,” because he’d learned a long, long time ago in the Argent family not to answer a confrontational question without knowing what the other person was really asking.

She removed her hand from the paper and crossed her arms instead.

He looked back down at the desk and carefully, oh so carefully, did not react in any way at all. “It’s a marriage license.”

“Yes, Dad, I noticed that, too.”

He raised his eyebrows and tried, pointlessly, to deflect. “Why were you looking through Vegas marriage records anyway?”

“There’s a rusalka at school now and we were trying to track down where she moved from to see if there were, like, murders or whatever,” she said, waving off that question impatiently. “Stiles found it.”

Chris’s jaw tightened. That damn kid. Too inquisitive for his own good. Well, no. Chris understood the driving need to collect all available information. But he was certainly too inquisitive for the good of anyone else around him.

“Well?” Allison asked. “Is it real?”

He allowed his eyes to trace the names the way he wanted to with his fingers but didn’t dare. _Christopher Argent_. _Peter Hale_. “Yes. It’s real.”

***

They’d blown past the “Leaving Beacon Hills” sign with the windows down and a mixtape already playing. So many years later, Chris couldn’t remember what was even on it or which of them had made it, but he did remember Peter’s smile, the way his eyes glittered in the sunlight as he reached for his sunglasses tossed carelessly on the dash, how his fingers played in the slipstream of air, how he howled their freedom once they’d passed the sign and laughed at Chris when he’d told him to knock it off.

“There’s no one to hear us, Chris. No one to catch us. Isn’t that the point of this little road trip?”

And Chris had allowed himself to be teased into a laugh and turned the stereo up louder. He still remembered that rising feeling of lightness, of euphoria, as they left the town, high school, their families, their _lives_ behind. They’d just graduated, and the future beckoned.

Peter being Peter, naturally the first thing he’d decided truly beckoned them was Vegas. Chris hadn’t argued against it as hard as he could have. He’d been taught all his life that the things Peter could do were monstrous and terrifying, but he’d long since fallen to fascinated instead, and all he really wanted to do now was watch his smug asshole werewolf boyfriend fleece people at cards.

They drove until they got hungry, stopped for terrible food, argued about Peter getting to drive Chris’s car, switched seats, drove some more, made out while waiting for the tank to refill at a gas station, switched seats again, and pulled into the parking lot of their bargain motel in that wired second-wind state between delirious and exhausted where everything was hilarious.

(Why was Chris still able to remember all of this so vividly?)

Peter took one whiff of their room and turned Chris right back around. “Nope.”

“Nope?”

“Nope. We’re not staying here, I don’t care if they won’t give us the money back, we’re leaving. I’m getting us a real room.”

“But…”

“No buts, Christopher,” Peter said, towing him back to the car by the wrist. He shot a _look_ back over his shoulder. “Well, except yours. Believe me, that is not the setting I intend to enjoy you in all weekend. And what is the point of having all this graduation money if not to spend it?”

“Pretty sure it was intended for you to buy shit for your dorm room,” Chris noted.

“Oh, I’ll win back plenty to cover that,” Peter laughed.

And he did, plus somehow won them their room as well. He was so smugly pleased with himself by the time they hit the elevator, it was all Chris could do to keep things even slightly in the realm of PG as he crowded Peter into the corner and licked into his mouth. “That was so hot,” he muttered into side of Peter’s neck, “the way you took all their money while only half-awake.”

Peter obligingly tilted his head back and laughed. “Oh, Christopher. I am such a terrible influence on you.”

“Probably,” Chris agreed, and then the elevator arrived on their floor and they had more interesting things to occupy their attention.

He woke up the next day to Peter propped up on one arm, grinning down at him.

“Hey,” he mumbled, still not quite awake.

“Hey,” Peter said back. “Wanna get married?”

Chris felt something warm and bright and wonderful expand in his chest. It was such an unfamiliar feeling that a breathless laugh punched out of him, and he reached up to pull Peter to him until he’d kissed him equally breathless. “Yeah, I really do.”

They had it done before lunch, and they didn’t leave their hotel room again until it was time to head back to Beacon Hills.

It was the best weekend of Chris’s life.

***

“Dad!”

Chris blinked back into the present and shrugged. “What do you want me to say, Allison? We were 18, we were in love, we were in Vegas.”

“You were in love? With _Peter Hale_?”

“Yes.” It’s all he can trust himself to say right now.

“But… what about Mom?”

“I’m sure Stiles can find the divorce records in there, too. Everything about my marriage to your mother was perfectly legal, I assure you.”

She looked less angry now, but more confused.

“Tell him to look five years later,” he said, pulling his invoices back toward him. He wasn’t sure what Allison saw on his face just then, but she left without another word.

***

“I’m sorry, what did you just say?” Peter asked in a tone Chris knew perfectly well was deceptively pleasant.

Chris looked down at his hands, hanging uselessly between his knees. They were shaking. “I’m getting married. Or so my dad tells me.”

“But, Christopher, you’re already married.” Peter was so deadly, deadly calm. “To me.”

“I know,” Chris whispered.

“Am I just an inconvenience to you now?” Oh, there it was. That poisonous snap Chris hadn’t had directed at him in years.

“No!” he protested, looking up and letting all his anguish show on his face.

Peter sank to his knees in front of Chris and took his face in his hands. “Oh, sweetheart, I know. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want this! But I don’t know what to do. My family, they didn’t tell me anything about this, no hunter news while I was deployed, not anywhere someone might see it, you know. All I heard was how proud my dad was of me for making all these good future business contacts, gaining such good experience, a bunch of bullshit about Kate’s latest marksmanship competition scores or school swim meet. They didn’t tell me it was like… _this_.”

Because things had truly gotten bad. Chris had no sooner walked through the door and set down his duffel, sand still clinging to his boots, before he was drawn into evaluating reports of weakened pack alliances and asked for suggestions on how to further destabilize them. Chris had simply left one warzone for another.

And apparently his father considered an important part of the Argent war preparations to be this arranged marriage to some woman from another hunter family. Just another thing he’d forgotten to mention.

“He acts like I should be happy. He actually said I should be relieved not to have to worry about the hassle of dating. He already bought us _a house_ ,” Chris hissed. He could feel tears trailing down his face and he didn’t care. He’d had a lot of nightmares in recent years, but he’d somehow never imagined anything like this.

They tried. For days they tried to find some other solution, some way to defuse the ticking time bomb that the supernatural world had become, but there was nothing. It was a situation that had been coming to a head for years, and neither of them had been aware, kept insulated by their families “for their own good.” The older generations viewed it as inevitable, just another rising tide of clashes that would ebb back eventually into just another lull in their neverending war.

There might have been a time when they could have run. Changed their names, disappeared together, and no one would have cared. But now?

“They'll hunt us down, you know they will,” Chris said. God, he was so tired. “If we tell them now, they’ll kill us where we stand, and it’ll touch off the war that much sooner.”

He risked a look at Peter, hoping his Machiavellian brain had managed to see some way through this that Chris had missed, but Peter looked just as exhausted as he did, for once.

“I know,” Peter said, defeated. Chris had never heard that tone from him before. He hated it.

They went to Vegas. They got a divorce.

It was the worst bachelor party Chris could possibly imagine.

A month later, Chris was married to Victoria.

A month after that, his father tried to kill every werewolf at a pack peace summit.

There had never been a future with Peter; he’d just been too blind to see it. They both had.

***

The kids were all actually in school for once and Chris was running errands. Post office first, then the grocery store, where he was now standing in line for coffee before getting a cart, trying to decide if he should get a haircut, too, as long as he was out.

“Don’t,” a familiar voice said from behind him.

He turned to see Peter behind him in line, a very small smile just hinting around the edges of his mouth.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t get a haircut. You don’t need it.”

Chris frowned. “How…”

Peter gestured at the back of his neck. “You always do that. Run your fingers up through the back of your hair to test the length. You never actually liked keeping it that short, as I recall.”

The smile bloomed into a smirk at that, and Chris swallowed against the memory of Peter’s fingers running through his hair and tugging just a bit.

“Next,” the barista called.

Chris shook himself back into the real world and gave his order, then stood to the side. When Peter joined him there a few moments later, he wondered if he should have just ordered black coffee so he wouldn’t have to wait.

Peter continued to look him over. It seemed expectant, in a way none of their other brief encounters since Chris had moved back to Beacon Hills had. Certainly it seemed less antagonistic.

“Did they ask you, too?” he said, finally.

“Ask me what?” Peter said mildly, which meant he absolutely knew what Chris was talking about.

“Stiles found our marriage license. Allison had a copy.”

“Oh, yes. They gave one to Cora as well. We had quite the little soap opera confrontation at the loft. Derek really does such a good look of betrayal. I suppose he thought he had the market cornered on affairs with Argents.”

 _Affair_. Chris felt his mouth flatten as the word hit him, and he kept his gaze trained on the lid dispenser on the counter in front of him.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Peter murmured. His hand brushed Chris’s back ever so briefly. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

Their coffees were deposited in front of them at the same time, saving Chris from having to respond. He could go grab his shopping cart now, replenish his and Allison’s dwindling supply of Raisin Bran, go home and leave Peter Hale in the past where he belonged. Instead, he said, “Do you have time right now?”

Peter took a small sip of his coffee to check the taste and then curled a smile at Chris that Chris remembered entirely too well. “For you, dear? Of course.”

Chris led him to the bank down the street. They didn’t speak on the way, just drank their coffee in companionable silence as they matched pace without thinking. Chris tossed his cup as they entered the bank, even though he wasn’t done, and Peter raised his eyebrows.

“Wait for me here?” Chris asked.

“Certainly. My interest has been piqued now.”

Chris stepped up to the counter and told the teller, “I need to get into my safety deposit box.”

“Oh, of course. Let me get the manager.”

It wasn’t a busy time of day, so it was only a few minutes before Chris found himself in a cubicle in the back with a small safety deposit box open in front of him. This wasn’t even his regular bank, being small and local, with no out-of-state branches, exactly what he’d needed at the time. He took a deep breath and reached into the box.

Two rings. Titanium. Stupid of them, really, as they could never be resized, but they’d thought the durability of the metal symbolic. Chris couldn’t keep from slipping his on. It couldn’t make it past his second knuckle, time and age having wrought too much change on his hands since his 18-year-old self first put it on. He slipped it back off and set it on the counter next to Peter’s. He’d never been sure if Peter had given him the ring back to make a point, or if it was just a practical response to Chris saying he’d handle it all. Possibly he just hadn’t wanted to have the reminder.

Chris _had_ wanted the reminder, but it had been entirely too dangerous to keep anything that even hinted at their relationship in the house, or anywhere his father might have access to, so he’d gathered everything he could and rented this box. This was the first time he’d opened it since.

A handful of snapshots. Polaroids, so they wouldn’t have to be developed by anyone else, from an era before digital photos had been commonplace. He didn’t remember looking that young. Or that happy. He’d forgotten that was even an expression his face could make.

And lastly, a bundle of letters. Every single one that Peter had sent him in the five years of their marriage, most of which he’d spent deployed. Peter had insisted he liked the romance of it; “epistolary courting,” he’d called it, and Chris had made some obnoxious comment about his big college history major vocabulary that he’d then made up for by sending Peter a fountain pen as soon as he’d had a free minute to track one down. (He’d been on a base in Europe briefly then, so it had been possible, for once.)

 _You—_ he saw in the salutation line of the letter on top of the stack. He knew if he unfolded it, the signature would read _—Me_. It had started because they hadn’t wanted to take any chances with their names, but it had quickly just become their thing. If they’d truly been as paranoid as they probably should have been, as they would both later become, they’d have destroyed each letter as soon as they read it, but Chris had never been able to do that, and never regretted keeping them. Just knowing they’d existed here, in this box in a town he might never have returned to, was enough for a long time.

He gathered everything up, left the box where it was, and returned to lobby. Peter was sitting in one of the armchairs, legs crossed, leafing through a magazine as he finished his coffee, as if this was nothing unusual.

Chris froze halfway across the tile when the thought struck him that this could have been their life. In some weird alternate universe where hunters and werewolves weren’t at war, where they’d just been two boys who fell in love and got married shockingly young, whose families had been appalled but unable to do anything about it until it eventually faded into something to tease them about at holiday gatherings. They could have been waiting for each other while running errands for twenty some odd years now. He felt like he couldn’t breathe.

Just like that, Peter was next to him, hand a steadying weight on his back. He looked a question at Chris, and Chris handed him his wedding ring in silent reply.

“Oh,” Peter said, voice carefully blank. “You kept them?”

“Of course.” Chris showed him the edge of the letters as well, some part of him still sure his father would come back from the dead just to find them.

Peter’s eyes widened the slightest fraction, and he turned to throw his now empty coffee cup away. He looked resolute when he turned back. “Come to my place for the afternoon?”

Chris just nodded, a quick jerk of his head, barely a gesture, but it changed something between them. The distance between them on the walk back to the grocery store parking lot kept shrinking as they gravitated towards one another in a way they hadn’t allowed themselves for such a very long time.

“Follow me,” Peter said. He waited at the exit of the lot until Chris could pull up behind him, then led him to one of the new high-rises downtown, all glass and chrome, concrete and steel.

It wasn’t the kind of building he would have associated with the old Peter, Chris thought, slanting a look at him across the elevator. The old Peter had liked shine and sparkle and newness, same as this one, clearly, but he’d been attracted to warmth as well, wood and paper and leather and… home.

Looking around the living room of Peter’s apartment now, as he let them in and tossed his keys in some excessively artistic chromed metal bowl, all he saw was cool colors and hard surfaces and—his brain finally caught up with him here—things that couldn’t burn. Everything was new.

“It’s only been a year for you, hasn’t it? Since the fire,” he said as he thought it, and immediately wished he could take it back when Peter spun to face him, half a snarl on his otherwise untransformed face. But then, Peter had always had excellent control. When he wanted to.

Then Peter closed his eyes and forced his shoulders down, and Chris let out the breath he was holding. “You are the only person to realize that,” Peter said. He gestured gracefully at his absurdly modern couch before turning in the direction of the kitchen. “Sit.”

Chris sat. He put the letters on the glass coffee table in front of the couch, then centered them, making sure the front edge was exactly parallel with the edge of the table. He set the stack of photos next to them, equally exact.

A glass of water appeared before him and he took it automatically before he’d even registered that Peter was back in the room and settling at the other end of the couch. He tossed another stack of letters onto the table.

Chris blinked. “You still have them?” _They didn’t burn?_

Peter knew exactly what he was asking. “I’d put them in the family vault so Talia’s overly inquisitive children wouldn’t find them.” He took a sip from his own glass and gave a pained little half-smile. “That is, of course, also the reason I took them back out of the vault last week, now that Derek has remembered its existence.”

He leaned forward to flick through the pictures. “My god. Do you even remember being these people?” he said, an echo of Chris’s earlier thoughts.

“Barely.” Chris studied Peter as he looked through the stack, not even checking to see which ones Peter paused on; he already knew. He wondered if it was even possible to salvage anything of who they had been, after everything that had come between: Victoria, Allison, Kate, Derek, the fire, Kate, his father, _Kate_. “How…” He shouldn’t say this; he had to say this. “How are you letting me back in here? After everything?”

Peter put the photos down and considered Chris seriously. “You had nothing to do with the fire. I know that with absolute certainty. My research into it was _very_ thorough.”

That last sentence was said with such vicious satisfaction that Chris swallowed. “I tried to kill you.”

Peter cocked his head and smiled. “Christopher, I was mad. I would expect nothing less from you. It’s who you are. If it happened again, I’d expect the same.”

Chris narrowed his eyes. “Is it likely to happen again?”

Peter picked up the two bundles of letters and started interleaving them. “I sincerely hope not.” He finished sorting the letters to his satisfaction and held one out to Chris. “Here, it appears the first one is yours.”

“I’m not reading these aloud,” Chris warned as he took it.

“Hmmm, perhaps not,” Peter agreed, and shifted over on the couch until he was close enough to read it over Chris’s shoulder.

***

Chris had thought he remembered those years well, better than most, really, but the letters were full of inconsequential details that proved just how much his memories had faded. Reading Peter’s observations about the many inaccuracies evident in his school’s monster movie marathon the week before Halloween breathed life and color back into everything, both the memories and the present.

Chris hadn’t realized how dull everything around him had become, he’d been living with it for so long.

He startled when his phone rang. They were somewhere in the middle of the stack, in part because Peter’s letters were always so long, but also because they kept pausing to reminisce or argue over the context for some half-obscured statement that must have seemed obvious to them both at the time.

“Allison? Everything all right?”

“Yeah, Dad, I just wanted to tell you I’m staying at Lydia’s tonight.”

Chris frowned. “Actually _staying_ there?”

“Yes!”

“You know you kids can ask for backup if you need it. I’d really prefer you asked even if you don’t think you’ll need it.”

He heard Stiles in the background saying, “I solemnly swear I am up to no good,” and then a yelp as he presumed someone hit him, possibly Allison.

“It’s fine, Dad, I swear. We invited the rusalka over for some girl time. As long as it’s just us girls, everything should be fine. We just want to make sure she knows whose territory this is. Erica will be there,” she added, and it said something about how much their lives had changed recently that telling him a werewolf would be there was a selling point.

“Okay. Have fun, then. Be sure to check in.”

“Thanks, Dad! I will.”

He hung up and found Peter staring at him, eyes practically glittering in anticipation.

“So you’re mine for the rest of the evening.” It wasn’t a question.

“Did you have something in mind?”

Peter leaned forward to murmur directly in his ear. “Oh, Christopher, you have no idea.”

And then he pushed himself up off the couch just as Chris’s breath caught in his throat, sure Peter had been about to kiss him. The look Peter shot him over his shoulder as he turned into the kitchen said he knew exactly what he’d done.

His suave exit was ruined by his exclamation of “Dammit!” as he opened the refrigerator door.

Chris leaned against the entrance to the kitchen with his arms crossed and smirked. “Problem?”

“I never did get groceries.”

Chris snorted a laugh, he couldn’t help it, and Peter turned on him with a distinctly predatory look.

“Guess I’ll just have to eat you instead.”

And yes, goddammit, Chris’s blood did heat at that, in memory and in anticipation, but he was terrified of pushing this thing between them, whatever it was now, too far, too fast. “Why don’t we just order something instead?”

Peter inclined his head. “That will do. For now.” He brushed intentionally close to Chris on his way back out of the kitchen. “It still counts as an unfulfilled fantasy.”

Given that Chris had been fantasizing about Peter waiting for him in the lobby of the goddamn bank, he figured he couldn’t really reply to that.

***

Peter ordered them dinner and served it with wine Chris knew he only drank for the taste. He tilted the bottle to see the label.

“Oh, I know this vineyard. Victoria approved of them.”

Peter raised his eyebrows, but all he said was, “A woman of good taste.”

“Oh, yes, Victoria always had that.” Chris sighed as he set the bottle back down. “It’s been strange, to be honest. I know Allison mourns her mother, and our life together wasn’t… terrible. We made the best of it. Found things in common. But love certainly never came into it, no matter what my father thought. Victoria was always his ideal, not mine.”

Peter’s eyes narrowed. It was probably good Gerard was already dead.

“I knew what I was getting into. It was fine. It was what we had to do.”

“That doesn’t make it right. It never did.”

“I know,” Chris said quietly. “But we can’t exactly go back and change it.”

Peter tapped his fork gently against his plate a few times in thought. “Well. In the interest of full disclosure about exes, everything I know about wine, I learned from Matthias, and everything I know about food, I learned from Olivia. So we may now thank them all collectively for our enjoyment of this meal.”

And that… that response felt almost absurdly normal. This was what adults did, wasn’t it? Came back into the dating world with pasts and baggage? Granted, theirs was stranger, and heavier, than most, but. Maybe this could work.

Chris ate his dinner and enjoyed it.

***

They returned to reading the letters after dinner, though they moved everything into Peter’s bedroom when he sat back down on the couch and then stood right back up again, turning to scowl at it.

“I don’t care how much this thing cost and how famous the designer is, it is _not_ comfortable. I’m throwing it away tomorrow.”

Chris smiled as he bent to retrieve the stack of letters. “Is this really the first time you’ve noticed?”

“I don’t… actually spend that much time in here,” Peter admitted, and looking around the rather bare room, Chris wasn’t surprised.

The bedroom was better. The furnishings were still black metal, but the mattress was comfortable, there was something of an excess of pillows, and there were clothes hanging off a chair in the corner and a stack of books on the nightstand. He wondered if Peter had ever really lived alone before the fire. He knew the plan had been for him to be Talia’s advisor on lore and history, and looking back, he had no idea how they’d realistically thought they’d make it work to ever live together. He’d always assumed Peter had lived at the house in the Preserve after the divorce.

And now he lived here, in this Spartan apartment with its one lived-in bedroom and a bunch of uncomfortable but stylish furniture in all the other rooms Peter had no idea what to do with.

It wasn’t really what Chris had expected, though he was starting to suspect it should have been.

When he raised his eyebrows at all pillows, Peter shrugged and concentrated on positioning several on his side into a satisfactory backrest. “I was in a coma for six years. I have a lot of opinions about the perfect pillow now. Most of these were rejects.”

Chris appropriated his own pile and reached for the next letter. Three letters later, Peter had migrated to being propped against Chris’s chest instead, and was flipping his wedding ring from the tip of one finger to another, seeing how far he could get it down each one.

“I was just thinking earlier, it was stupid to get titanium,” Chris said, watching him go through the pattern again.

“No,” Peter replied. “I like it. We can’t change them, just like we can’t go back. We can’t truly recapture all of this,” he gestured at the papers spread across the bed, “but we can build something new from it. I love these rings for who we were when we naïvely chose them, and because now they’ll have to stay in the past where they belong.”

Without thinking, Chris kissed the top of Peter’s head. Peter tilted his head back to look at him, and Chris froze, not sure how to read the expression. Then Peter was twisting and sitting up until he was straddling Chris’s waist, taking his face in his hands, and kissing him fully. He started gentle, a little tentative, or at least as tentative as Peter ever got, but when Chris responded by gripping his hips and kissing him back, things got hungrier.

Peter sat back briefly, hands on Chris’s chest. “You knew we were going to end up here, right?”

Chris nodded. “I knew.”

“But you can say no. We’re not who we once were.”

“I know. But I don’t want to.” Chris was so tired of denying himself the things he actually wanted. He felt like he’d been doing it his whole life, except that one weekend in Vegas, half a lifetime ago.

“Good,” Peter said, and stripped off his shirt.

***

Later, as they lay breathless in the dark, the faint glow of Beacon Hills’ paltry downtown filtering through the largely pointless sheer curtains over the window, Peter traced a pattern over the scars on Chris’s torso and said idly, “Do you know what I have in the garage downstairs?”

Chris was pretty sure the car he remembered following from the grocery store was an utterly forgettable sedan, so that couldn’t possibly be what Peter meant. “What?” he asked.

“A Shelby Cobra.”

Chris was tempted to turn on the bedside light just to check whether Peter was fucking with him or not, but he was too comfortable and it would take too much effort. “Are you joking? Do you _drive_ it?”

“Of course. It would be a crime not to.” He smiled and Chris could feel it against his chest. “What do you say, Christopher, are you still falling for the bad boy with the fast car?”

“Of course.” Chris stroked his hand up and down Peter’s spine and wondered how soon he could convince Peter to let him drive it.

“Do you know why I bought it?”

“Why?”

“Because it was the first thing I actually _wanted_ after I woke up. Just wanted. Not for revenge or power, just for myself.” He pushed himself up so he could look at Chris, the scant light in the room more than enough for his eyes. “Do you think you can help me find more things to want?”

“I think I can try. It’s been a long time since I wanted anything either.”

“Good,” Peter said, and resettled himself. “I do like it when we start from an even playing field.”

Chris drifted off to sleep wondering how he was going to manage to find something more to want than what he had right at this moment.

***

As it turned out, Chris wanted a lot of things.

He wanted breakfasts.

He wanted lunch dates.

He wanted text messages about annoying crossword puzzle clues that required familiarity with recent pop culture.

He wanted to test-sleep his way through all the pillows on Peter’s bed until he found just the right one for him as well.

He wanted Allison to understand. (He cheated and gave her the letters and the photographs. The photos were all in an album when she gave them back. He was pretty sure he recognized Lydia’s hand there.)

He wanted to help Peter buy a new couch.

He wanted to know each other’s coffee orders without thinking about it.

He wanted to go to a fancy restaurant and complain about wearing a tie when Peter hadn’t even bothered and still managed to look more put together.

He wanted half his shirts to have migrated into Peter’s drawers and vice versa.

He wanted to live his damn life.

And so he did.

And when Peter asked him a year later, when the kids had all gone off to college (even Derek, who it turned out hadn’t quite finished before… well, before), if he wanted to drive to Vegas, he said yes. (They took the Cobra. Peter let him drive, at least for a while, and howled when they passed the “Leaving Beacon Hills” sign.)

And when Peter kissed him awake the next morning and said, “Hey, wanna get married?” he said yes to that, too.

They let Stiles find the record again as their announcement. “It seems only fair,” Peter said.

**Author's Note:**

> Stiles absolutely sends them the tackiest velvet Elvis painting he can find as a wedding gift.


End file.
